History
While small test programs existed since the development of programmable computers, the tradition of using the phrase "Hello, world!" as a test message was influenced by an example program in the seminal book The C Programming Language. The example program from that book prints "hello, world
" (without capital letters or exclamation mark), and was inherited from a 1974 Bell Laboratories internal memorandum by Brian Kernighan, Programming in C: A Tutorial, which contains the first known version:
The first known instance of the usage of the words "hello" and "world" together in computer literature occurred earlier, in Kernighan's 1972 Tutorial Introduction to the Language B, with the following code:
main( ) { extrn a, b, c; putchar(a); putchar(b); putchar(c); putchar('!*n'); } a 'hell'; b 'o, w'; c 'orld';
For modern languages, the hello world program tends to subtly grow in sophistication. For example, the Go programming language introduced a multilingual hello world program, Sun demonstrated a Java hello world based on scalable vector graphics, and the XL programming language features a spinning Earth hello world using 3D graphics.
Read more about this topic: Hello World Program
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It may be well to remember that the highest level of moral aspiration recorded in history was reached by a few ancient JewsMicah, Isaiah, and the restwho took no count whatever of what might not happen to them after death. It is not obvious to me why the same point should not by and by be reached by the Gentiles.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (182595)
“When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?”
—David Hume (17111776)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (18891951)